A blog about Bloomsbury Academic's 33 1/3 series, our other books about music, and the world of sound in general.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

If you don't like lists, look away now

A few stragglers (with valid excuses) remain, but we've ended up with proposals for books about albums by the following people. The Flaming Lips win with four proposals, narrowly trumping Willie Nelson, U2, Steely Dan, GNR, and Van Morrison, who each have three.

A huge thank you to everybody who submitted a pitch. We'll do our very best to pick the best ones, and to let everybody know by the end of January.

You'll be glad to know that only one of the proposals contains the word "fisting".

24 comments:

Anonymous
said...

As one of the submitters it's hard not to just nervously hope that mine sneaks through to publication, but I do think that for record geeks a Vegas pool on this would be FASCINATING, especially since I'm not sure how you go about laying out the odds here (is a title that multiple people suggested a "surer" bet? what about one by an artist that already has titles in the series- is that less likely?). Really quite an intriguing phenomenon.

There is a time for everything,a season for every activityunder heaven. A time to beborn and a time to die. Atime to plant and a time toharvest. A time to kill anda time to heal. A time totear down and a time torebuild. A time to cry anda time to laugh. A time togrieve and a time to dance.A time to scatter stonesand a time to gather stones.A time to embrace and atime to turn away. A time tosearch and a time to lose.A time to keep and a time tothrow away. A time to tearand a time to mend. A timeto be quiet and a time tospeak up. A time to loveand a time to hate. A timefor war and a time for peace.

May this Christmasbe your time to laugh,embrace & forpersonal peace,Dr. Howdy

Going over this list, I'm amazed that bands like Arcade Fire and Libertines are being pitched. Not that I don't like them, but classic albums need time and historical perspective to be considered classic. Too damn new, y'heard?

I tried hard to avoid too much duplication in the pitching process, but it seems inevitable when there are so many people involved. Having two, three, or four pitches about the same artist doesn't make it any more likely that we'll end up choosing one of those. Current thinking is that we'll end up choosing 15-20 proposals out of these.

wow, this is a crazy long list! i would love to be a fly on the wall for the selection process. you must have some serious aesthetics/audience/series cohesion mathematics to perform to get the answers here. good luck.

Though it may not have the commercial audience, I think an amazing 33.3 edition would be on Shudder To Think's "Pony Express Record." I have never gotten sick of this album, and it sounds as new today as it did in '94. It completely changed how I listen to band dynamics and think about songwriting.